Nowadays, a lot of people use different kind of services to go from location A to B. In the last few years, a lot of new taxi service applications are established, for example Uber, Lyft, and Gett. Imagine, that in maybe five years it will be possible to get your taxi ride in the air!

On Monday, 25th of September 2017, the world’s first taxi service in the air is tested in Dubai. The German company Volocopter designed this flying drone. The two seated drone, which looks more like a helicopter, has 18 propellers and a maximum flight duration of 30 minutes (Ibekwe, 2017).
During the test, the drone was unmanned and hovered upward about 200 meters and whirred for about five minutes. This taxi drone, also named Autonomous Air Taxi (AAT), has a cruise speed of 50 km/h, and a maximum airspeed of 100 km/h (Moon, 2017). The AAT is about two meters high, and the diameter is around seven meters. It is powered by nine batteries and featured by low noise levels, which makes the AAT an environmental friendly vehicle (Browning, 2017). During the evolvement of the production vehicles, all these features will be adapted.

Dubai strives to lead the Arab world in innovation. They believe that encouraging innovation and adopting the newest technologies, will build bridges into the future. Besides that, it will contribute to the country’s development to a high-tech, forward-looking society (Baldwin, 2017).
Dubai and Volocopter envision a future where it will be possible to book a flying taxi through an app. To make use of this flying taxi, you will need to go to the nearest ‘’voloport’’ where the AAT will pick you up. In the upcoming years, they will implement full sense capability. This will make it able to avoid obstacles and accidents with other flying vehicles (Reichert, 2017). If they will succeed, you can make yourself ready to make your first flying taxi ride within five years!

Bibliography

Baldwin, D. (2017) Watch: Dubai tests world’s first self-flying taxi. Retrieved on September 26, 2017 from http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/transport/watch-dubai-tests-world-s-first-self-flying-taxi-1.2095961

Browning, N. (2017) Dubai starts tests in bid to become first city with flying taxis. Retrieved on September 26, 2017 from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-dubai-drones/dubai-starts-tests-in-bid-to-become-first-city-with-flying-taxis-idUSKCN1C0232

Ibekwe, D. (2017) Dubai just tested its flying drone taxi for the first time. Retrieved on September 26, 2017 from http://www.businessinsider.com/dubai-flying-taxi-drone-volocopter-test-pilot-unmanned-2017-9?international=true&r=US&IR=T

Moon, M (2017) Dubai tests a passenger drone for its flying taxi service. Retrieved on September 26, 2017 fromhttps://www.engadget.com/2017/09/26/dubai-volocopter-passenger-drone-test/

Reichert, C. (2017) Dubai begins testing drone taxi service. Retrieved on September 26, 2017 from http://www.zdnet.com/article/dubai-begins-testing-drone-taxi-service/

You probably already heard about the two new iPhones Apple is going to launch this fall. The iPhone 8 is already available, but the iPhone X is the one everybody talks about. This iPhone is dedicated to Apple’s 10th year anniversary and will be available in The Netherlands on the 3th of November.

There are several new technologies on this new iPhone X, but the most interesting technology is its face recognition. The new handset, which will sell from €1159, allows users to unlock it simply by looking at it. This new iPhone is the most expensive one ever since. The Face ID system of the iPhone X is able to recognize the owners face by the TrueDepth camera. This works by sending out more than 30,000 invisible dots that pinpoints all areas of the owners face. Besides that, an infrared camera also tracks all patterns of the owners face (Suciu, 2017). This will help to confirm that this device belongs to the actual user. To make sure that the Face ID works over time, and adapt to physical changes in the owners appearance, machine learning is added (Apple, n.d.). Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data (Kohavi & Provost, 1998).

However, there are some critics about the performance of this Face ID system. For example, what happens when someone holds a photo of the owner in front of the camera? It could be possible that the technology will be fooled. This will lead to security problems. It is also not clear what happens when someone gained or lost a lot of weight or has a disease like edema, that makes your face look noticeably different during the course of the day (Suciu, 2017). Will machine learning keep up on these changes? We have only seen demos so far, how this actually is going to work, can be answered in the near future…

Sources:
Apple (n.d.) iPhone X. Retrieved on September 24, 2017 from https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/
Suciu, P. (2017) How Many Ways Might iPhone X’s Face ID Go Wrong? Retrieved on September 24, 2017 from http://www.technewsworld.com/story/How-Many-Ways-Might-iPhone-Xs-Face-ID-Go-Wrong-84808.html
Ron Kohavi; Foster Provost (1998). “Glossary of terms”. Machine Learning. 30: 271–274.